Anna Staniszewski

I got an email from my agent the other day that made me grin like a chimp. She’d read my latest revision of my YA novel, Keeper of Stories, and felt it was in good enough shape to start submitting to publishers. This was an especially triumphant moment for me because I’ve been working on the book for almost four years now. It’s gone through so many revisions, I couldn’t even begin to count them and I was starting to worry that it might never get to a place where it feels done.

As I went through the manuscript one more time this weekend, looking for any last errors before it was sent out,  some parts read as if I’d never seen them before. I’ve had that experience with things I’d written long ago, but Keeper has only been out of my hands for a few weeks. I think the distance I was feeling from it was because  of the fact that at this point so much of the book has changed that I can’t keep it all in my head anymore.

I think this is why outside readers are so valuable. Once you’ve worked and reworked a piece for years, it’s nearly impossible to have any objectivity towards it. Putting it away and coming back to it later certainly helps, but ultimately the process starts to become such a blur that it’s hard to keep everything straight. You know your characters so well that it seems like their thoughts and motivations are obvious to everyone because they’re so evident to you. This is the downside of working on something for so long.

But, on the upside of having a project going for so long is that you can slip in and out of the world of the book with almost no problem. It feels like a familiar, comfortable place that’s nice to come back to. In a way it’s sad that my days of slipping back into that world may be numbered, though I’m sure there are still many more revisions waiting for me if an editor does decide to take it on.